Diary of Interrupted Days Read Free

Serbian plates. By the way, I’m Miša.”
    Ten minutes later, Miša slowed to turn right onto a side road. They entered a village, and after taking the first left,they pulled into a parking lot in front of a small café. It was in a picture-perfect house, with white walls, green shutters, and flowers in window boxes. Miša switched off the engine and they went inside together, and took a table by the window. A petite brunette with large green eyes took their order.
    “How did you find this place?” Boris asked.
    “I had a flat tire once and limped in looking for a garage. The owner borrowed a spare for me, and didn’t even charge. The waitress—she’s the owner’s daughter.”
    “She’s sweet,” Boris said.
    “She is. But I come for the food. My wife hugs me each night when I get home safe, but I know that it’s also so she can sniff me. And she checks my clothes for hair. It’s just too complicated to stray and I can’t be bothered.”
    Sunlight reflected on the white facades of the houses opposite the café, red and blue flowers on their windowsills. The food arrived and they ate in silence. When they were done, Boris offered Miša a cigarette.
    “Which route do we take from here?” he asked as he extended his lighter.
    “The usual: Szeged, Horgoš, Subotica, Novi Sad, Belgrade. It’s about two hundred miles, give or take, and a little over fifty from here to the border. I always aim to get to Belgrade before five. They attack after sunset mostly, but sometimes they come sooner. In Hungary, I take it slow and steady—if the cops catch me speeding, I’m in for some serious money. After we cross the border, we’ll go as fast as my bus can stand.”
    “Is that what you do if the planes come?”
    “That’s what I do. Amateurs park on the side and hide under the trees. But mice don’t lie down hoping the cat won’t see them.” He suddenly remembered to ask: “Did your plane arrive on time?”
    “No. We were an hour late. Why?”
    “Fuck. Let’s go.”
    Boris paid the girl and ran after Miša, who was already turning the vehicle around. “What?” Boris said as he closed the door and the bus veered onto the main street.
    “You know how planes have to fly through certain corridors? There are roads up in the sky, just like down here. Some of those roads are in the way of the bombers. When a plane is late, it usually means that its normal corridor is closed and the bombers are coming sooner. We have to hurry.”
    Sara had already been gone when the bombing of Serbia started, and Boris’s world had turned surreal. As an artist, he deconstructed reality and reinserted pieces intended to create a shift in perception in those who saw his art. But now nothing seemed real enough to deconstruct. He would turn up every morning at his job on the twenty-ninth floor of a building at the intersection of Yonge and Bloor, and he would try to work, concentrating on shapes and colours, lines and shades, and then find that hours had passed as he stared out the window at the CN Tower. A similar tower had already been destroyed in Belgrade. Sometimes he envisioned a giant condom covering the whole edifice, turning it into a colossal penis aimed at any deity allowing this nightmare to happen. Whenever he put his headphones on and inserted a music CD into hisMac, he ended up searching instead for radio news on the Internet.
    When he pulled into the big underground garage in his apartment building at night, he judged its merits as a shelter from air raids. On the supermarket shelves, he only had eyes for canned foods. He returned from a trip to the drugstore to buy shaving oil with band-aids and antiseptic cream. He melted sedatives under his tongue several times a day, and took Saint John’s wort before he climbed into bed, but slept only a few hours each night.
    He was safe in Toronto, far from the fury of metal that was happening in the Balkans. He also knew that his parents would be fine. His father was a retired